Wall's major scientific contributions were twofold. First, he was integral in transforming the investigation of pain into a key area of modern neurobiology, one that is fully amenable to study at the molecular, cellular and systems levels. And second, he recognized that the ability of the nervous system to change — its plasticity — is fundamental to its function, both in normal circumstances and in disease.
Wall studied medicine at Oxford University during the Second World War, moving shortly afterwards to the United States. There, during brief sojourns at Yale, Chicago and Harvard, he mastered the art of electrophysiology and interacted with many of the major figures in the then new field of neuroscience. Afterwards, he settled for some years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was here that his fundamental work on pain and neuronal plasticity evolved, culminating in the seminal 'spinal gate control theory', which he developed with Ron Melzack and published in 1965. This theory basically proposes that there is a gating system in the central nervous system that determines when and how much pain we feel from an injury. It offers an explanation for why similar injuries can produce widely different sensations of pain, depending on whether a gate in the spinal cord opens or is blocked in response both to the pattern of input it receives and to influences from the brain.
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